Pa hagha Jahaan ba khlas

v la azaaba

Ka dale e sarikaar v la

kitaba

Da Khushal Khattak pa

zhaba barakat sha

Che wail ka pa Pukhthu la

hara ba’ba

(Hellfire will they steer clear of

A bond with the book who form

Blessed be the tongue of Khushal Khattak

All topics in Pashto who has broached)

he Afghan conflict has brought us both riches and misery. From building our houses and roads to selling us groceries and collecting our waste, there is precious little that the Afghans living in Pakistan wouldn’t do, more often than not for a mere pittance.

It all began three and forty years ago, in December 1979, when the forces of the then Soviet Union crossed over the Oxus River (Amu) into Afghanistan.

One was quite oblivious of the geo-politics and its ramifications. But one couldn’t afford to stay aloof for long as Pakistan soon thereafter started noticing the fallout. Pakistan was supporting both the resistance and its backers in the West to the great chagrin of the Soviets.

Every few days, therefore, the media would report intrusion and shelling by the Soviet fighter planes in the Arandu area of Chitral and Shilman on the Durand Line.

The story of the Afghan conflict needs no retelling; it has been re-enacted and told every single day of its calamitous journey. One would only be repeating it and risk employing undesirable clichés, rhetoric and platitudes.

Nonetheless, one would like to very briefly recollect some aspects of the conflict.

One day on a singularly unremarkable evening, one gingerly walked into the Peshawar bureau office of the now defunct, The Muslim.

The office was located in a small street in the heart of Peshawar’s cantonment bazaar in an equally small claustrophobic building, perhaps built to house a typical low-income Peshawari family.

A fair-complexioned man, fairly tall, sat in a chair with a typewriter placed in front of him on a table cluttered with handouts and press releases. The room was poorly lit. The gentleman wore old-fashioned glasses. This unpretentious man was Rahimullah Yusufzai, the bureau chief of the newspaper.

Told that I was interested in working for the bureau, Mr Yusufzai wasted no time before asking which particular school of political thought I identified with.

Without ever having known what the boss wanted to hear, I minced no words telling him about my political choices and affiliations. I was then handed a handout with the direction to develop into a news report.

Before long I learnt that Rahimullah didn’t want any ‘rightist’ to gatecrash into the office. Also, he had no love lost for the leadership of the seven-party Peshawar-based Afghan resistance alliance. He considered the resistance to be the antithesis of progressive politics.

A couple of days after joining The Muslim as a trainee, I started reporting, mostly on the Afghan conflict from what we would later jokingly call the Vodka Street.

As things stood then, one would never know what the street owed its fame to: the bureau office of Pakistan’s most popular English-language newspaper or to Gullu the bootlegger sitting on his haunches in the street, waiting for his countless customers.

Rahimullah, was no ordinary journalist. He was already the most sought-after reporter. His reputation had travelled far and wide.

How journalists and diplomats from Islamabad were attracted to that filthy little street like bees to their hive, was incredible.

Rahimullah was larger-than-life. Sadly, the obituaries one read fell short of doing justice to his class, intellect and stature. Having known him all my adult life, I am sure he wouldn’t have been pleased by any of the charitable elegies.

Suffice it to say that at the peak of Soviet intrusion and later imminent withdrawal, not knowing Rahimullah was risking ignorance of important details about the Afghan conflict.

The soft-spoken gentleman from Mardan district knew Afghanistan like the back of his hand. It was as if he had learnt every little bit about that unfortunate country by rote.

Every few days, one would find a renowned foreign journalist reclining on the steel sofa, either talking to Rahimullah or waiting for him to come downstairs from his upper-floor lodging.

Rahimullah would type his stories, which he would then hand over to the telex operator, Ismail. Whenever needed, he would write those in his neat handwriting, ensuring to encircle every period so that Ismail didn’t get them wrong. Thus engaged in writing, he would keep balancing his glasses. He loathed being distracted by colleagues while he worked on his stories.

A dyed-in-the-wool journalist, Yusufzai was a pain in the neck for the Zia-era establishment. Due to his extremely affable and gentlemanly character nobody dared touch him. You could really trust him to throw spanners in the establishment’s work, howsoever hard it tried to assure the Soviets that Pakistan was not helping the resistance.

When the Soviet withdrawal looked just around the corner, Rahimullah produced incontrovertible evidence of a convoy bound for the Mujahideen.

He had left Peshawar for Kurram Agency at the break of dawn and returned home at midnight. Without caring to soothe his limbs and nerves, he sat before his typewriter and ensured that the story appeared in the next morning’s paper. He had already alerted the head office with a ‘stop press’ request.

The report created a furore but Rahimullah remained unharmed.

Among Rahimullah’s admirers was Sandy Gall.

By chance one recently came across a 1984 video that shows Sandy Gall embedded with the resistance fighters in the faraway gullies, canyons, hamlets and rugged mountains of Afghanistan.

Sandy Gall was synonymous with the Afghan resistance movement, especially his fabled friendship with Ahmad Shah Massoud.

The video shows three Soviet deserters helping the Mujahideen defuse landmines and helping them with other chores. Of particular interest is a mule that Gall in his running commentary says was loaded with a million dollars worth of weaponry.

As it happened, most of the rockets and missiles fired by the foot soldiers missed their targets to the bemusement of everyone in the group. Dressed in their ragtag traditional Pashtun attire, wherever possible, the fighters would feast on sheep meat along with Gall.

Those were the times before the resistance was supplied with Stinger missiles. This was a lethal stroke by the Texas representative Charlie Wilson. It changed the game decisively against the Soviets.

The video is classic historical record. More than anything else, it brings out the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets as the exact opposites of the present-day Taliban. While the Mujahideen stayed focused on the withdrawal of foreign troops from their motherland, the Taliban could be seen not only at war with their countrymen but also at war with themselves.

The Mujahideen looked to be swatting the enemy from their door but the Taliban seem bent on smashing every door and intruding into every household.

There is little doubt that the resistance leadership was corrupt and given to ostentatious lifestyle. However, the foot soldiers looked earnest. On the other hand, both the Taliban leaders and their rank and file look sated, nosy and brutal.

In a lighter mood, Rahimullah once said that people in his village wanted him to grow a beard. Pashtuns, he said, may not be very keen to give their daughters and sisters their rightful share in family property, and many indulge in usury and other vices, but they want every man to sport a beard to be considered pious.

Somewhere in the late ’90s, after meeting the Taliban founder Mullah Omar, a change came over Rahimullah. Some of his detractors accused him of supporting the Afghan Taliban.

Some people thought that being a Pashtun nationalist by instinct, Rahimullah Yusufzai believed the Taliban to be espousing the cause of nationalism. One must not forget that most of the fiercest critics of the Taliban were and still are Afghan Pashtun nationalists.

Rahimullah died in September 2021. He once said fiction didn’t fascinate him much. Of facts, he had a vast repertoire with which he would liberally build and embellish his stories.

One must now be forgiven for employing a cliché. Rahimullah was larger-than-life. Sadly, the obituaries one read fell short of doing justice to his class, intellect and stature. Having known him all my adult life, I am sure he wouldn’t have been pleased by any of the charitable elegies.

The writer is a freelance journalist